Currently, there are numerous situations where a physician may need to know coordinates of a specific area or target within a body. For example, a physician may need to know a particular location in biological tissue and/or an organ relative to a reference point in space. Exemplary situations include the following:
i. Patients may suffer from dangerous arrhythmia caused by a cardiac muscle area that generates abnormal electric signals. The search for, identification and ablation of such malfunctioning cardiac tissue can depend on knowing the location of a selected part of the probe (catheter) used in the ablation procedure. The Carto 3 system manufactured by Webster Biosense and the I Logic system of Super-dimension are examples of systems designed to achieve such localizations;
ii. Lung cancer and other pathologies are often investigated by employing a bronchoscope for visualization, taking a sample (biopsy) for histopathology, excision, etc. In such procedures, the bronchoscope may be guided to the target that is imaged by Cat Scan. Such guidance can depend on continuously knowing the position of the bronchoscope tip position (coordinates) in relation to the target and some reference points. The guidance can be achieved by means such as Electromagnetic navigation (EMN);
iii. During brain surgery, a surgeon may need information regarding a position of a probe or an electrode relative to a surface point and a target area, as in the case of heart described above;
iv. Following several procedures related to prostate hypertrophy or prostate cancer, a physician may need to return to a previously visited site and/or to avoid such a site in a subsequent procedure;
v. Following colostomy or similar procedure in the GI tract, a physician may need to return to the site of resection of a polyp, a malignancy or the site of some other previous manipulation. This need may arise, for example, from the need to perform a resection after receiving the information that the removed tissue includes a malignancy; and/or
vi. During procedures involving the ingestion of capsules, such as the Given Imaging PillCam Capsule, it can be important to know the position of the capsule that moves along the GI tract.
Current imaging technologies (e.g., Ultrasound, Cat Scan (CT), and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)) can enable localization (e.g., position determinations) in cases where the target area has substantially clear recognizable features and/or in cases when a marker (e.g., a metal staple) was left in the target during a previous invasive procedure. However, current imaging technologies can emit harmful radiation (e.g., X-Rays and/or CTs). Current imaging technologies can involve expensive equipment (e.g., MRI), have relatively low resolution and/or can require relatively large markers (e.g., as in the case of ultrasound). Accurate localization using scanning systems such as CT or MRI can rely on generating thin slices of images taken one after the other. Such a procedure is typically not suited as an aid for the various manipulations associated with bronchoscopy and/or cardiac catheterization.